Calls for a stronger pedagogical connection between teaching the language of schooling and teaching foreign languages have been made for years, as it is believed learners might benefit from the potential synergies. However, language lessons continue to focus largely on a single language. The SWIKO triple S project therefore investigates whether similarities between the language of schooling and foreign languages can be utilized to facilitate and enhance learning.

In 2004, the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK) issued a decision to begin foreign language education already at primary school; as a result, Switzerland’s cantons have successively adapted their foreign language education programmes, starting in the 2006/2007 school year. The new requirement has generated prolonged and multi-layered debate in which various sources are cited, including scientific studies, literature on early language instruction and other forms...

All residents of Switzerland are required to interact with the administrative authorities through written correspondence, necessitating the development of a degree of "administrative literacy" which will often involve plurilingual communication. This research project focuses on the understanding and drafting of written correspondence with social security bodies such as the unemployment, disability, AVS, and family allowance services.

The aim of the DiCoi project is on the one hand to produce teaching material from recordings of authentic conversations (spoken language corpora) and on the other hand to describe the longitudinal development of interaction skills (over 2 years) from recordings of free interactions.Spoken language corpora can be used as a resource for foreign language teaching with the aim of providing exposure to the authentically produced but contextualised target language.

SWIKO is a multilingual learner corpus describing learner language according to principles of corpus-linguistics. The corpus is an umbrella project developed during the 2016–2019 research period and being further developed in the 2021–2024 period. It incorporates data from other projects at the Research Centre on Multilingualism. SWIKO can currently be accessed via a request to the Institute of Multilingualism.

In line with the strong presence of usage-based approaches to language description and research in language acquisition, research in corpus linguistics has intensified and diversified in recent years. This applies equally to corpus-based and corpus-oriented research into language acquisition as well as to applied pedagogical research. Nevertheless, research gaps and desiderata remain. For instance, in regards to learner corpora, certain bias towards English as the target language, intermediate...

This project aims to describe the development of productive writing skills in children with a Portuguese immigration background living in Switzerland (in the language of origin and in the language of instruction). It is based on data collected as part of the project Language of origin and language at school: are language skills transferable? (HLC) from the work programme 2011-2015 by the Research Centre on Multilingualism. The project will be divided into three stages: